The Lights on Knockbridge Lane (Garnet Run 3)

Wes shrugged, his eyes flat.

“And now?” Adam asked.

“Now?”

“Yeah, now that you can do whatever you want, how do you celebrate?”

“Oh. I don’t, really. At all. Anything.”

“How come?”

Wes traced Adam’s cheek absently, and when he spoke his voice was husky and low.

“I guess I never felt like I had much to celebrate.”

Adam felt the words like they’d been thrown at him, and they hurt.

Wes—beautiful, brilliant, sweet, generous, weird-in-a-great-way Wes—didn’t feel like he had anything to celebrate.

Adam’s mission was clear: he had to celebrate the hell out of Westley Mobray.

“Well that’s settled, then,” Adam said, forgetting he hadn’t said any of that out loud.

“What’s settled?”

“You should have Christmas with us!”

For a moment, Adam thought Wes didn’t like the idea. Maybe it was too soon? Mason had always told him he got too invested, too enthusiastic, jumped the gun. But it felt right to Adam—so right. And when things felt right, he wanted more of them.

Then Adam realized that Wes had turned away and was clenching his fists because he didn’t want Adam to see the emotion in his face.

“Come here,” Adam said. He tugged Wes back to him. “Look at me.”

Wes raised his eyes to Adam’s. His nostrils flared and he licked his lips, and Adam could see the years of solitude and isolation crumble like a cliff face into the sea.

“I—If you—Really?”

Adam’s heart swelled with affection for Wes. He wanted to pull him so tight against his chest that he could feel Wes’ heartbeat and the movement of each breath. He wanted to kiss him and kiss him until all they could taste was each other. He wanted to sleep and wake and sleep and wake with Wes’ arms around him and his arms around Wes, and shit, Adam knew what that meant.

He knew what it meant and he knew it was too soon and Adam, gah, don’t say it out loud! he screamed at himself. But even if he didn’t say it, he knew: he was falling for Wes Mobray. Seriously, deeply, no joke falling in love with him.

Love. Shit.

Chapter Eighteen

Wes

Adam Mills had invited him for Christmas.

It was such an ordinary sentence, but it set Wes’ blood on fire with joy and possibility.

His senior year of high school had been the last time he’d attended his parents’ annual holiday cocktail party. He’d made the obligatory appearance, endured the endless comments about his stint on The Edge of Day, and ducked every offer from an agent or casting director to get him back in the spotlight. The spotlight was, he explained, exactly what he wanted to escape.

The next year, he’d stayed at Caltech through winter break, making excuses about needing to monitor his experiments in the lab, and he did so for the next three years too, until he graduated. When he started back at Caltech as a grad student, he stopped going home to visit altogether. The invitations became perfunctory, then. More an excuse for his parents and Lana to express their disappointment and hurt than any genuine desire to see him (or so Wes believed).

Every now and then over the years someone in his cohort would drag him to a holiday party. They were a relief of cheap drinks and frozen hors d’oeuvres and white elephant gifts with budgets of ten dollars or less. But although they were less stressful, he didn’t enjoy them. Just like his parents’ parties, they reminded him that he didn’t belong; just in a different way.

One year, he was dating Lyle seriously enough that he agreed to accompany him home for the holidays. It had been an exercise in torment because Lyle had told his parents about Wes’ family and they took advantage of any downtime by asking him to tell them stories of Hollywood and what it was like to be on a film set. He looked at Lyle differently after that. He’d been the first person in grad school that Wes had confided in about his family and he’d thought Lyle understood how reticent he was to be connected with them. After all, he’d enrolled in grad school under his mother’s last name precisely to distance himself from his past, his father, and now his sister, because Lana’s star was also on the rise.

Lyle had blinked wide eyes and apologized, but said he thought his family would be so interested that he’d been sure Wes wouldn’t mind slaking their curiosity.

Wes hadn’t left in the middle of the trip because he abhorred drama of all kinds. But he’d quietly ended the relationship in his mind right then and there, and ended it out loud a week later when they returned to Pasadena.

He hadn’t celebrated a holiday since.

Occasionally on his birthday, he’d buy himself some piece of gear he’d wanted for his work, but he did that not on his birthday as well. And he never, ever, ever acknowledged Christmas (although he enjoyed Zachary’s seasonal texts repurposing cheesy Christmas memes into Chanukah ones).